


Completely Undressed and Mostly Sober in the South of France

by viviandarkbloom



Series: the french connection [1]
Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: F/F, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-07 22:32:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11068452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: Couple folks have been giving me prompts on tumblr, so here's one of them thus far: Things you said when you were drunk. This takes place post-series 4.





	Completely Undressed and Mostly Sober in the South of France

**Author's Note:**

> Couple folks have been giving me prompts on tumblr, so here's one of them thus far: Things you said when you were drunk. This takes place post-series 4.

Sitting outside Caroline’s office triggers a wave of unfortunate flashbacks for Gillian. She thinks of all the times she got into trouble at her own school, how miserable she made her parents because of it, how she hated wearing a skirt every day and enduring a perpetual updraft on certain intimate and crucial body parts. This—added to the actual excruciating reason why she stupidly sits waiting for Caroline—in turns prompts a manic round of nail-biting.

Giving in to impulse as usual, she had shown up at the school in Huddersfield during an inset day; the students were on break while the teachers and staff frantically caught up on unnecessary paperwork and pointless meetings. She had hoped to cadge a few minutes to offer—yet again—another apology and one last desperate stab at making amends to Caroline about the stupid thing she said recently whilst drunk. Instead she found Caroline in a shitty mood and off to a meeting with her teachers. She was given a terse command of “wait here” and was not-so-gently shoved in a chair outside Caroline’s office, where she had nothing to do but look at the drab industrial misery of outdated school architecture and furniture and to fixate helplessly on Caroline’s name plate on the door, which was crooked.  

About twenty minutes into this agonizing and particularly lame Samuel Beckett play— _Waiting for Oxford Bitch_ —Caroline’s secretary returns from lunch break.

“Can I help you?” the young woman asks before plopping down behind a desk.

“No. Thanks. Just waiting for—” Gillian nods at Caroline’s door.

“You a parent? Family member?”

“Yeah. I mean—no, I’m not, um, related to a student. I’m, I’m Caroline’s stepsister.”

The woman raises an eyebrow. “Oh.”

Gillian has heard this damning stress upon this simple syllable many times throughout her life: _Oh, you’re the idiot who: got caught shagging someone in a cricket pavilion, in the back of a Subaru, in the front seat of a Fiat. Was found drunk and passed out in an inflatable bounce house. Got run over by a war vet in a wheelchair after you told him Sheffield FC was the worst club ever. Left groceries on the top of your Land Rover as you drove out of the parking lot. Did karaoke to Celine Dion. Flashed a vicar. Told a group of Britain First tossers outside the pub that Brexit was crap and they were morons and Beyoncé was going to take over the UK and make them all slaves and consequently was pretty amazed at how fast you could still run._

The secretary attempts—and fails—to hide a smirk behind a cup of tea. “So _you’re_ Gillian.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Hear you’re really in the shit, love.”

Giving up on her nails, Gillian starts gnawing her lower lip. “She—she told you what I said?”

“Nah. All I know is you said something really stupid.”

“That would be the title of my f-f-bloody memoir, you know? _I Said Something Really Stupid._ ”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Those were real nice flowers you sent her.”

Morose, Gillian rubs the back of her neck. “Real expensive, more like.”

“Yeah, but I think she liked them. She kind of made that ‘I’m pleased but I don’t want you to know it plus maybe I’m constipated’ face.”

“Did she say anything when she got them, though?”

“Well, I says to her, ‘Who sent you those?’  and she says, ‘My stepsister is a knobhead and she said something really stupid at Easter dinner but if she thinks she’s gonna charm her way out of it she’s quite mistaken.’”

“That wasn’t charm. I don’t do charm,” Gillian protests. _“I was sincere.”_  

The secretary clucks sympathetically. “Don’t doubt it. Want some tea while you wait? We’ve got doughnuts too.”

Stuffing herself with a doughnut seems infinitely preferable to gnawing off her fingernails. “Yeah. Thanks.”

It turns out that sugar hinders Gillian’s impulse control as much as alcohol does, because after a cuppa and two powdered doughnuts she’s relayed the whole sorry story and its lengthy genesis to the secretary—Simone, who offers her a fresh napkin after every doughnut and pays such heightened attention to every detail as if she is Caroline’s official biographer, but actually it’s because she’s been trying to find a chink in her inscrutable boss’s considerable armor for months and thinks this mouthy, anxious farmer is indeed the Achilles tendon—and Gillian thinks she should feel guilty for going on like this, but she has been tying herself into knots over Caroline for so long that this lengthy catharsis is utterly necessary for her to maintain the scrap of sanity she has left.

Gillian even lets slip her final, desperate move. “Today—I was gonna—well, I’ve got a plan.”

Simone pitches eagerly on the edge of her chair, which hasn’t been replaced since 1992 and creaks ominously at the sudden redistribution of weight. “What?”

“My brother—half-brother, actually—he’s kind of a twat sometimes but he’s, um, generous to a fault—anyway, he’s bought this farmhouse in France, in the Rhone Valley, well, he’s calls it a chateau but like I said he’s really a twat sometimes. He plans on using as a vacation home and he said I could use it later this summer, so I was thinking I could take Caz—”

“’Caz’?” Simone squeals gleefully while adding another delightfully incriminating factoid to the Caroline McKenzie-Dawson mental file.  

“—oh shit, don’t call her that. Anyway, was thinking I-I could take her there, we could go for maybe a week or so, it would be nice, you know? We c-could be alone, no children, no parents—we could spend time together, talk, drink wine—”

“You mean shag each other silly,” Simone clarifies.

This sets off a chain reaction of so many nervous, stress-related tics that Simone’s professional training kicks in and she is about to ask Gillian if she is on medication and requires any assistance when Gillian finally manages to squeak out an _er_  and settle herself with several deep breaths.

“That sounds grand, Gillian. But y’know, when Caroline gets out of her meeting she is going to be in a total shit mood, so I think maybe you should tell her about it later? Like, show up at her house with more flowers, wear something sexy—”

Eagerly, Gillian nods. “I just got this blue plaid shirt—really brings out my eyes.”

“Well.” Simone pauses. “Just bring another bottle of wine and lay it on her, yeah?”

“Y’know, you are really smart,” Gillian says. “You should be running this bloody school.”

“Sweetheart,” Simone replies, “I already do.”  

*

As correctly predicted, Caroline is in quite the shit mood when she finally emerges from her meeting forty-five minutes later. A cluster of pain has camped out on her brow and pinching the bridge of her nose has, unsurprisingly, done nothing to alleviate it. The thought of dealing with Gillian now makes her stop in the middle of an empty hallway and gently tap her head repeatedly against a bulletin board. Which also does not help with the headache. While she was finally prepared to forgive, she couldn’t forget what happened; they still had a lot to hash out, but she was hardly in the proper frame of mind to do so.

To her furiously vacillating relief and disappointment, however, Gillian is gone when she arrives back at the office. But from behind her desktop Simone is smirking suspiciously, which means she either knows something Caroline doesn’t—a phenomenon more recurrent than Caroline likes—or is looking at photos of Idris Elba online again.  “How was the meeting?” she chirps.

“Don’t ask.” Caroline pauses in front of her office door. “Any messages?”

“Yep.” Simone picks up a pad and starts rattling them off: “Mr. Fraser called about the budget extensions, wants you to call him back. Sami Nahin’s mum called about his lost inhaler and I said we still haven’t found it. Michael Dobson called again about the job reference—”

“Wankpot,” Caroline mutters.

“—the liaison from Schools Out called about setting up the cyberbullying workshop—”

“Oh Christ, almost forgot about that.”

Simone breaks into a shit-eating grin. “—and finally, your stepsister was here, ate three powdered doughnuts, and informed me that you have glorious tits.”

Once again Caroline commences genteel head-banging, this time against the office door. “Wonderful. Well, thank you, Simone. My day is truly complete.”

“Aw, come on. Pretty good to hear that at your age, innit?”

“Suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

“She seems really sorry.”

Caroline says nothing. She still doesn’t know how it all happened, how the situation had escalated so quickly. One moment they were sitting on the couch having a perfectly normal, straightforward, and serious conversation about Calamity’s problems at her preschool while drinking a nice rosé—well, several glasses of it and maybe a shot or two of tequila—and the next thing she knew she was practically giving Gillian an extremely unprofessional lap dance, blouse open and bra unhooked, and Gillian was nosing around in her cleavage like a pig honed in on a mother lode of truffles and moaning, _oh God, you’re perfect._  Then after a lot of furious sloppy snogging she passed out on the couch and woke hours later covered with a quilt and with Gillian gone. True to form, they both assiduously avoided any discussion of the incident for weeks.

Then Easter dinner, three days ago. A lot more wine consumed, an innocuous compliment from Alan on her dress, and Gillian’s inebriated follow-up to all within hearing—in other words, everyone: _’Course it hangs nicely on her, she’s got glorious tits, I can vouch for that._ At which point Celia went into a swoon and Caroline felt duty-bound to drag her to A &E to make sure she did not and would not have a stroke.  

Since then all hell has broken loose. The children are all in various forms of uproar and denial—except for Flora, who gurgles on merrily and Calamity Jane, who persistently asks her father and anyone within earshot what _tits_ are. Alan keeps googling about support groups for aging parents of closet cases and her mother keeps digging herself deeper and deeper into a homophobic hole: _How drunk were you? I hope you’re happy now, you’ve made Gillian a lesbian, as if she weren’t enough of a sex fiend already._ Gillian has apologized to her multiple times, to Celia, to everyone, bought her flowers and a fancy Bordeaux, offered to do both landscaping and Jeep Cherokee maintenance free and without complaint for as long as they both live, and fervently swore to never reference a Quentin Tarantino movie ever again.

Caroline sighs. “I know she’s sorry.”

“Yeah. She seems sweet, really. And I probably shouldn’t say anything but—” Simone continues, sotto voce: “—she wants to take you to France.”

Skeptical, Caroline drums her fingers against the door. “Did she happen to be enveloped in a cloud of Jagermeister when she said this?”

“No, said her brother bought a house there—in the Rhone Valley, and he was going to let her use it for a week. Sounds real romantic—wine, cheese, making love.”

Caroline now recalls Gary’s presence at the infamous Easter dinner—afterwards he had apologetically informed Caroline that if she and Gillian got married he would not pay for it—and how he had been going on about the house, which he called a _chateau_ and which made Caroline want to call him a twat. But the mere thought of being there with Gillian—completely undressed and mostly sober in the south of France—pleases her beyond words. “Those are a few of my favorite things,” she admits.  

“Right Maria von Trapp, so I suggest you hit that up and maybe accept her apology, yeah?”

“You know, my former secretary wouldn’t have dared speak to me like this.”

“Everybody needs a little encouragement sometimes.” Simone smiles sweetly. “Don’t they, Caz?”

Caroline freezes, does a menacing half-turn while raising an equally terrifying index finger, and fixes her with the same deadly, soul-shredding glare she once employed on a junior staff member who said leggings were making a comeback. “Simone?”

The secretary gulps.

“We’re not making that a thing,” Caroline says. “All right?”

“Right.”

The office door slams shut.

And Simone quietly, defiantly mouths _Caz_ at it.


End file.
